ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Health of the Nation (HoN) policy in the light of the realist health policy framework. It describes the policy, explores it against a realist policy and sketches out problems that a realist health policy must resolve. Announcing the key areas of the health policy for England the White Paper explains that they were chosen because they were areas where ‘there is both the greatest need and greatest scope for making cost-effective improvements in the overall health of the country’. The missing issues of health inequalities, in-tersectoral policy development and resources for the strategy were sometimes noted by reviewers but a conscious effort seems to have been made to accentuate the positive. The chapter discusses the fault lines of contemporary inequality in England and Wales. The health policy response is to tackle inequalities head on and to see inequalities as connected with each other through the life-chances available to individuals and families.
